Saving the Salton Sea

The Salton Sea — increasingly saline, polluted and shrinking, maybe dying — is worth saving. Just about everybody says so. It still provides habitat for 400 species of birds and is an important way station on the 5,000-mile Pacific Flyway for bird migration. If it dries up, it would leave behind a 375-square-mile toxic dust bowl. It holds a key to the economic future of troubled Imperial County. And the historic 2003 agreement that gave San Diego County a major new supply of water transferred from Imperial Valley farms would not have been possible without an agreement to also save the sea.

But how? The state assumed most responsibility for the sea’s restoration, but its 2007 plan carries a $9 billion price tag. The state doesn’t have the money and has done nothing to implement the plan. Nobody expects that to change soon.

The Imperial Irrigation District, the supplier of water and power for the Imperial Valley, is pushing its own plan, developed in partnership with Imperial County. It’s intriguing, one-third as costly as the state plan, and worth serious study and consideration.

The centerpiece of the IID initiative is the development of renewable energy resources — mostly geothermal, but also involving solar, wind and algae — with revenues leveraged and used for partial restoration of a smaller but more sustainable Salton Sea. The vast acreage beneath the sea contains what is believed to be the largest supply of untapped geothermal resources in California. And the IID owns much of that land.

But its plan seems only half-baked.

For one thing, the IID is also seeking to withdraw from a joint project with the San Diego County Water Authority that would end a 12-year-old program of pouring water into the sea to stabilize its elevation. The two agencies agreed in 2012 to seek state approval to instead sell that water, allowing the lake to recede, and to use the revenue, estimated at $117 million to $156 million, for environmental mitigation projects at the sea. The IID now opposes that 2012 agreement because it would accelerate the shrinkage of the sea. But the mandate to pour water into the sea will end anyway at the end of 2017. So IID’s effort to keep it going, forfeiting the millions that could be made, is shortsighted. Common sense calls for the IID to stick with the 2012 agreement.

A second issue is the lack of demand so far by utilities for geothermal power, largely because of its higher costs. The agency is pushing legislation by state Sen. Ben Hueso, D-San Diego, to unfairly force investor-owned utilities like SDG&E to purchase 500 megawatts of geothermal power, but that is hardly the answer to the problem.

There are other hurdles. Still, the IID deserves credit for coming up with an innovative plan that would help restore the sea, provide jobs for the region’s depressed economy and promote the use of renewable energy resources. It’s complicated, and a zillion problems and issues must be worked out. But it has great promise.